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2006: The year in videos

By Will Knight

This year New Scientist provided readers, or viewers, with more movies then ever before. Here is our round-up of some of the catchiest clips from the past 12 months.

The year kicked off with some remarkable animal-related video stories. One provides somewhat dubious evidence of the survival of the ivory-billed woodpecker, which was thought to be extinct in its native North America.

Another story shows a remarkable trick used by some octopuses to evade predators. While camouflaging themselves as ocean floor plants, they walk along the seabed on two limbs. Further ocean curiosities, including some “Jurassic shrimp”, were revealed in a recent video accompanying the 2006 Census of Marine Life.

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Crawl and run

The award for ickiest animal story of the year must surely go to one showing the extreme measures some worms take when feeding their young. Nursing mothers of Boulengerula taitanus transform the top layer of skin into a tasty treat for their offspring as the accompanying video shows.

It was not just animals displaying creepy-crawly qualities, either. UK researchers developed a insect-like crawling robot that might eventually explore a person’s intestines, providing video footage for a watching doctor or surgeon. You can see it wriggling through slippery sections of pig’s gut in experiments.

This would be not match for “Runbot”‘, the fastest bot on two legs, which showed of its speedy steps in several video clips. Another robot with a slightly-less useful special skill was a yoyo-wielding one developed by researchers from Slovenia.

Hone a clone

Perhaps the most eye-catching robot videos of the year shows an android doppelganger created by Hiroshi Ishiguro at Osaka University in Japan. Ishiguro’s idea is for it to eventually fill-in for him during meetings but, by the looks of it, it may not fool any of his colleagues just yet.

More dazzling gadgets and gizmos were on show at the SIGGRAPH computer conference in Boston. These included a model that visually morphs its shape and a gadget that gently nudges users around, which might someday be used for navigation.

But surely the most energetic contraption revealed this year was an immersive kung-fu video game created by researchers from Finland and tested on a number of real martial arts experts.

Having a ball

Yet more high-octane clips showed just what some physicists get up to in the lab, with researchers from Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics and the Humboldt University creating tiny balls of lightning under controlled conditions. These are occasionally seen during thunderstorms but are still poorly understood.

Computer simulations showed another dramatic event – colliding black holes – that revealed the ferocious ripples created in space-time when such a catastrophic events occur. Further simulations also showed just how Tsunamis would spread if an asteroid were to crash into the Earth’s oceans.

And finally, what better way to use a multi-billion dollar space outpost than for a spot of golf? This November, Cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin hit a golf ball from the porch of the ISS, making the longest shot in the history of the game, even if he did miss-hit it spectacularly.